No. 4.] TRUSTS AND THE FARMERS. 193 



2. The power of the trust is so great as to l)ecome dan- 

 gerous. Its legitimate profits are so immense that the wealth 

 already acquired tempts the managers to adopt illegal and 

 unjust means to accomplish their purposes and add to their 

 wealth. The temptation is to charge the consumer an extor- 

 tionate price for the commodity ; or to limit production, 

 hoping thereby with less work to make an equal or greater 

 profit from the sale of a less quantity of goods at an enhanced 

 price ; or to continue the use of inferior machinery or proc- 

 esses, when new inventions and methods would make the 

 service better or the product cheaper; or to unjustly use its 

 working men, paying them low wages, neglecting their 

 safety, using up one lot of men and then turning them ofi" to 

 take a new lot of citizens or aliens in their places ; or to take 

 illegal advantage of competitors to drive them out of busi- 

 ness ; or to use unjust discrimination between difierent cus- 

 tomers or patrons, promoting the interests of one at the 

 expense of another, developing one community at the cost 

 of another, always of course for a consideration ; or to de- 

 fraud the public by watering the stock and selling it at a high 

 price to innocent buyers, only to manage the corporation so 

 that the price of the stock shall fall greatly, so that the ofii- 

 cers of the trust may buy it back again to repeat the process 

 over and over ; or to sell out the trust to alien capitalists, 

 whose only interest is to run the enterprise so as to make 

 the largest dividends, regardless of whatever untold evils 

 may come to employees, to the minority of the stockholders, 

 to the consumers, to the citizens of this or of following gen- 

 erations ; or to corrupt municipal councils. State legislatures, 

 the national government, political parties, or even the people 

 themselves, by bribery and sundry other devices known to 

 the shrewd manager ; or to endanger the State by evading 

 its just burden of taxation. 



These ten evils are by no means mere phantoms of the 

 imagination, but are very real. A careful student of the 

 origin and development and management of trusts, as re- 

 vealed in the history of the last twenty-five years, set forth 

 by the sworn testimony of promoters, managers, stockhold- 

 ers and others directly concerned, given in courts and before 

 various investigating committees, finds that each of the evils 



